Posts Tagged ‘Responsive Web Design’.

So how do you sell a design system to the client? How do you establish a shared commitment within the company to put a pattern library on the roadmap? As designers and developers, we often know and see the benefits of an overarching system that radiates consistency throughout the different experiences of a company. But sometimes it's seen as a very unpredictable investment, and the value isn't necessarily visible right away.

In his article on Selling Design Systems, Dan Mall suggests to illustrate how fractured an organization is by printing out its different presences online and putting them on a large board as an example of all the wasted money and effort that goes into making sites from scratch, one-by-one, needlessly reinventing the wheel every time.

The modern logo has to work harder than ever before. In the past, a company logo was perhaps intended simply for a shop sign and printed in local newspaper adverts. Today's logos have to work with a growing plethora of smart devices with varying screen sizes and resolutions, displaying responsive websites.

Often logos end up suffering within responsive website design. Many have not been designed with responsive frameworks and variable sizes in mind, and are just resized to fit whatever available space has been provided for them or not.

You know how it works: you spend hours trying to find a workaround for a problem that you have encountered, just to realize that it doesn't quite work in, you know, that browser. Finding little techniques and tricks to help you get to results faster can immensely improve your productivity, so you don't have to waste time on solutions that will never see the light of day.

I love finding those little useful front-end goodies that make our lives easier. Since technologies emerge and evolve permanently, keeping track on what's going on is often difficult, especially since specifications change and so does the browser support. For a replacement talk at SmashingConfOxford last week, I've decided to collect some of the useful techniques from various articles, conversations and my workshops in a slide deck — and since it proved to be useful for many front-end developers I've spoken to after the talk, I'm very privileged to share it with the entire community as well.

What's your responsive design process like? Do you feel that it's efficient? The following article is an excerpt from Ben Callahan’s chapter “Responsive Process,” first published in the Smashing Book 5 (table of contents). We've collected some useful techniques and practices from real-life responsive projects in the book — and you can get your hard copy or grab the eBook today. You will not be disappointed, you know. —Ed.

“The successful respondent to this RFP will provide three static design options for our team to evaluate.” I’ve never been a huge fan of taking a multi-option design approach, but I get it — sometimes a client needs this. “Each of these options will provide design for three unique layouts: home page, listing page, detail page.” All right. Now, we’re up to nine static design files. This is getting a bit out of hand.

As I was leading my course in responsive web design between 2011 and 2012, I kept stumbling over the process of wireframing. My students tended to focus on the wireframe as being the end game in the planning process. They didn’t understand that responsive design focuses on how users will access the content.

You can only imagine my relief when I happened to come across a video by Stephen Hay speaking at the Beyond the Desktop conference in 2012. There, in his talk on responsive design, he presented the concept of the content wireframe. This was a huge relief to me. I just knew there was a step before the process got real, but I couldn’t articulate it. In this post, I’ll describe the methods I use to get from content to responsive wireframe — and how you can, too.

Responsive websites, even the most modern ones, often struggle with selecting image resolutions that best match the various user devices. They compromise on either the image dimensions or the number of images. We can solve these issues and start calculating image breakpoints more mathematically, rather than haphazardly.

The lives of web developers aren’t getting any simpler as the number of different devices and potential screen resolutions increase. The high-resolution arms race seems to be never-ending as vendors try to top one another with innovations in laptop and mobile device screens. New devices such as TVs and smartwatches are entering the market, making the race even more complex.

While the growing adoption of responsive images cannot be ignored, it can be very difficult to employ the functionality under the constraints of a large CMS like WordPress. Although it is entirely possible to write the feature into your theme on your own, doing so is a challenging and time-consuming endeavour.

Thankfully, with the launch of WordPress 4.4, theme developers and maintainers will find it much easier to introduce responsive image functionality into their themes. In this recent launch, the RICG Responsive Images plugin has been merged into WordPress core, which means that responsive image support now comes as a default part of WordPress. Let's take a look at how the feature works, and how you can use it to get the best support for your WordPress site.

The responsive design revolution is truly upon us (if it hasn’t already happened!), and even though e-commerce websites haven’t picked up responsive design quite as aggressively as in other industries, it’s becoming increasingly popular.

So far, most of the responsive design thinking has revolved around covering the range of experiences from mobile to desktop. Yet little attention has been paid to the opportunities for expanding that range beyond the standard desktop screen, to create an experience optimized for modern large-scale displays.

Last year I read Jan Constantin’s post “Typographic Design Patterns and Current Practices” and straightaway wanted to do something similar with email. At the time I was studying responsive typography on the web, trying to break down the websites I liked in order to understand what made the typography work so well, then attempting to apply those findings to email design.

After seeing Constantin’s work, I also wanted to explore how other email designers were handling responsive typography. So, I amassed 50 emails across various industries that I think do a good job with typography to see if any patterns emerged. You can skip straight to the Google Doc showing the raw data and results.

Today, too many websites are still inaccessible. In our new book Inclusive Design Patterns, we explore how to craft flexible front-end design patterns and make future-proof and accessible interfaces without extra effort. Hardcover, 312 pages. Get the book →

Meet the new Sketch Handbook, our brand new Smashing book that will help you master all the tricky, advanced facets of Sketch. Filled with practical examples and tutorials in 12 chapters, the book will help you become more proficient in your work. Get the book.

Meet SmashingConf San Francisco 2017, featuring front-end ingredients, UX recipes and nothing but practical beats from the hidden corners of the web. Only practical, real-life techniques and recipes you can learn from. Get your ticket now!